Renaissance English History Podcast: A Show About the Tudors
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Renaissance English History Podcast: A Show About the Tudors
Renaissance England was a bustling and exciting place...new religion! break with rome! wars with Scotland! And France! And Spain! The birth of the modern world! In this weekly podcast I'll explore one aspect of life in 16th century England that will give you a deeper understanding of this most excit...
Recent Episodes
647 episodes
Body for Body: The People Who Ran the Tower of London
Did you know the very first person ever imprisoned in the Tower of London also became the first person to escape from it? He got his guards drunk, abs...
The Emperor Who Dropped Mary Tudor For a Better Dowry (And Changed History Forever)
In 1525, Holy Roman Emperor Charles V broke off his engagement to the young Mary Tudor, daughter of Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon, and married hi...
The Black Tudors History Forgot
**Note - I gave Cattalena's death date wrong - it's 1625 and I said 1525! So sorry!!! ***
When I picture Tudor England, I used to...
What If Tyndale Had Never Translated the Bible? The Man Who Invented English (and Died For It)
What if one man had never existed? William Tyndale was a scholar, a fugitive, and a martyr who died in 1536 strangled at the stake for committing what...
Answering the Internet's Most Googled Questions About the Tudors
Did the Tudors steal the throne? Did they brush their teeth? Did they smell? I typed "did the Tudors" into Google and answered every single autocomple...
Did Tudors Actually Swim? (The Answer Is Weirder Than You Think)
Someone asked me this from their pool. They were floating around listening to the podcast and thought, "did the people I'm obsessed with ever do this?...
Tudor Laundresses: Three Very Different Lives Doing the Dirtiest Job at Court
What did it actually take to keep Tudor England clean? Before dawn, before the court woke up, before Henry VIII put on his famous doublet, someone was...
Medieval Women Couldn't Hold Power? Meet the Two Female Sheriffs Who Ran Entire Counties
Everything we think we know about women and power in the medieval world is missing a few key details. Like the fact that there were exactly two female...
What If Thomas More Had Just Signed? (My Hair and I Discuss)
What if Thomas More had just signed the Oath of Supremacy? He could have. Plenty of people did. Cranmer signed it. Cromwell signed it. So why didn't M...
Spinster: The Job Title That Became an Insult
Before it was an insult, "spinster" was a job title. It meant a woman who spins thread. It appeared in tax rolls, court records, and legal documents....
The Tudor Women Who Controlled Access to the Queen (And Paid the Price)
You think office politics are bad? Imagine your entire career depending on whether the queen liked how you handed her a towel.Lady in waiting sounds l...
The Tudor Legal Loophole That Gave Women Their Lives Back
The moment a Tudor woman got married, she legally ceased to exist. No property, no contracts, no rights - her entire legal identity absorbed into her...
The Tudor Woman Who Ran the Household Pharmacy (And Accidentally Poisoned Everyone)
In early June in Tudor England, one woman was already up before sunrise. She had roughly four months to produce everything her household needed to sur...
She Told Two Kings No and Kept Her Castle (And They Had to Wait Until She Died)
In 1293, King Edward I finally got what he wanted: the Isle of Wight. He'd been trying to take it for decades. He had to wait until its owner, Isabell...
Patriotism in Tudor England: How a Nation Learned to Love Itself
It's Memorial Day, and I've been thinking about patriotism -- where it comes from, why people feel it so strongly, and whether Tudor people felt anyth...
Plague, Prayer and Running Away: How Tudor Londoners Survived the Epidemics
London, summer 1563. The city sounds wrong. The market stalls have gaps. And then you notice the door across the street — a blue cross painted on it,...
Did Elizabeth I Actually Order Mary Queen of Scots' Execution?
Someone in the comments asked me to do a deep dive on whether Elizabeth I actually gave the order for Mary Queen of Scots' execution. And the closer I...
She Never Said Her Mother's Name. But She Never Took Off the Ring.
Today is May 19th. On this day in 1536, Anne Boleyn was executed on Tower Green. And in a royal nursery somewhere in Hertfordshire, a two-year-old gir...
What If Edward VI Had Backed Down? The Deathbed Decision That Changed England
Edward VI gets overlooked. He's usually just the boy between Henry and the interesting women. But here's what people miss: Edward didn't just die and...
Henry VIII, Constantine, and the Art of the Very Confident Lie
Henry VIII wasn't content to just be King of England. He needed you to know he was descended from Constantine the Great, the Roman emperor who legaliz...
1509: The Year Everyone Thought It Was All Beginning
In 1509, England went from a dying paranoid king to a golden coronation to a deadly plague in about eight months. This is a Year in the Life episode,...
The Life of a Tudor Con Artist (They Had Job Titles)
In 1591, a Cambridge-educated writer named Robert Greene published a pamphlet exposing London's professional con artists. He named their roles, descri...
What If Anne Boleyn Had Lived? Cromwell's Three Choices and Where They Led
It's April 1536 and Thomas Cromwell has gone home sick. Except he's not sick. He's deciding what to do about Anne Boleyn.
In this What If...
Henry VII's Impossible Choice: Execute an Innocent Man or Lose Everything
In 1499, Henry VII had two men in the Tower of London. One claimed to be his wife's long-lost brother. The other was an innocent young man who had bee...
Tudor Medicine and the Mind: Melancholy, Music, and What Help Actually Looked Like
What happened in Tudor England when someone's mind turned against them? There was no therapist, no diagnosis, no prescription. But there was a whole s...
What If Lady Jane Grey Had Refused the Crown?
Jane Grey wasn't just a pawn. She was a fierce Protestant intellectual who made a real choice when the crown landed at her feet in 1553. What if she'd...
The Dairymaid: Tudor England's Most Underestimated Woman
Someone left a comment asking about Tudor dairymaids, and I went down a rabbit hole I did not expect. The dairymaid looks like a background character...
How Did Tudors Survive Without Coffee? (The Answer Is Weirder Than You Think)
You've probably heard that Tudor people never drank water, that ale was the default drink for everyone including children, because the water would kil...
The Tudor Uber Driver Who Floated Tudor London
Before bridges, before coaches, before passable roads, if you needed to get anywhere in Tudor London you needed him. The Thames waterman was licensed,...
The Most Important Woman in Tudor England You've Never Heard Of
Before hospitals, painkillers, or germ theory, the Tudor midwife was the most powerful person in the room. Licensed by the Bishop, sworn to secrecy, s...
What If Mary Queen of Scots Had Run? A Tudor Thought Experiment
Scotland in the 1560s was chaotic even by Tudor standards. In this thought experiment episode, we ask: what if Mary Queen of Scots had fled to France...
The Medieval Women Who Ran Businesses, Won Lawsuits, and Refused to Be Pushed Out
History says medieval women were powerless. Some of them knew exactly where the power was and went and got it.
In this episode I'm lookin...
Why Tudor England Refused to Eat Tomatoes For 200 Years
The story of how a respected Elizabethan botanist looked at a tomato, applied perfectly logical medical reasoning, and concluded that English people s...
What It Was Actually Like to Work in Henry VIII's Kitchen
Henry VIII's kitchens at Hampton Court occupied 55 rooms, employed 200 men, and burned six tons of wood every single day. This episode spends 24 hours...
In Tudor England, Your Dreams Were Everyone's Business
In Tudor England, a dream wasn't private. It was medical evidence, potential divine communication, and possibly a message from Satan. This video explo...
They Hung Babies On Walls: A Day Inside the Tudor Royal Nursery
The Tudor royal nursery wasn't a cozy domestic space. It was a department of state, with its own hierarchy, its own politics, and sworn oaths of loyal...
She Tested It. They Ignored It. The Women Who Invented Knowledge Before Science Had a Name.
In the late 1400s, two women were doing something radical: generating knowledge and insisting it counted. Margery Kempe was building an evidence base...
24 Hours in the Life of a Tudor Lady in Waiting (She Asked for Gambling Money. Her Mom Said Practice Your Lute.)
What did a Tudor lady in waiting actually do all day? We're spending 24 hours with Anne Basset at Greenwich Palace in 1538, hour by hour from 5am to m...
Did the Tudors DO April Fools?
It's April 1st, and I'm not going to trick you. Instead, let's ask a genuine question: did the Tudors even DO April Fools' Day?
The answe...
Three Queens Who Refused to Behave (And Why History Punished Them For It)
History has a word for queens who had opinions and refused to be managed. Today we're looking at three of them across three centuries - Eleanor of Aqu...